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User talk:CzechOut
Welcome to Memory Alpha, ! I've noticed that you've already made some contributions to our database – thank you! We all hope that you'll enjoy our activities here and decide to join our community. If you'd like to learn more about working with the nuts and bolts of Memory Alpha, I have a few links that you might want to check out: * Our policies and guidelines provides links to inform you on what is appropriate for Memory Alpha and what is not. Particular items of note are the and policies, the , our , and guidelines for proper . * includes a basic tutorial about how to use our special wikitext code here on Memory Alpha. * Naming conventions provides guidelines on how to name a new page that you may want to create. * The Manual of Style is an overview of the basic guidelines for how to format and style your articles. * is a list of suggestions that can help you put together an article that might end up on our Featured Articles list someday. * See the user projects page for current projects of our archivists, or help us to reduce the number of stubs. * Look up past changes you have made in your log. * Keep track of your favorite Memory Alpha articles through your very own . * Create your own user page and be contacted on this page, your . One other suggestion: if you're going to make comments on talk pages or make other sorts of comments, please be sure to sign them with four tildes (~~~~) to paste in your user name and the date/time of the comment. If you have any questions, please feel free to post them in our Ten Forward community page. Thanks, and once again, welcome to Memory Alpha! --OuroborosCobra talk 05:32, 2 September 2007 (UTC) Image Uploads When uploading images, please make sure that you format them in the same way that other images have been formatted, with a license, proper citation, and a category. Thanks! -- Sulfur 02:58, 11 September 2007 (UTC) :Also, when uploading screenshots, could you please use the JPG format instead of PNG? PNG is useful for diagrams or drawings, but for all kinds of photography, JPG is the preferred format because it leads to smaller file sizes. Thanks. -- Cid Highwind 12:26, 11 September 2007 (UTC) Lastly, ensure that you cite things in the proper format. Also, you don't need multiple categories. If you have (say for Spock) "Vulcans", you don't also need individuals and the top level image category. For example, see the changes I made to the image you just uploaded. -- Sulfur 00:35, 12 September 2007 (UTC) Images to delete? ::Regarding the following: * File:XindiSphereFires.jpg * File:ArcherPondersFuture.jpg * File:Enterprise departs spacedock.jpg ::Got any plans for these orphaned images or shall we put them up for deletion? User:Gvsualan All except * File:XindiSphereFires.jpg will be used. Only after I uploaded all my pics for did I notice that the synopsis wasn't actually finished. So within the next 48 hours, I'll be filling in bits from Act 3 and 4, which will allow for the use of the bulk of these images. Thanks for asking about them before deleting them unilaterally :):):) CzechOut ☎ | 13:14, 19 September 2007 (UTC) Show preview Hi, CzechOut. Just letting you know, when editing pages, even those you have marked as , please use the "show preview" button as often as possible. Not only will you be able to view your edits before saving, you will lighten up the load on the database... and you will also avoid annoying other contributors by having constant edits to the same page appear on the . Using show preview allows you to check the changes you made without saving, thus allowing you to alter them/preview them repeatedly until you get it the way you like. Please remember this in the future. Thanks, and thank you for your contributions! :-) --From Andoria with Love 00:03, 14 September 2007 (UTC) Disambig lks Please note that Kirk does not go to the same place as James T. Kirk. When attempting to link to one, please do not link to the other, use a piped link in its place. -- Sulfur 13:30, 23 September 2007 (UTC) Show preview, part deux It is again asked that you please use the "show preview" as often as possible while editing. To reiterate what I said above, "Not only will you be able to view your edits before saving, you will lighten up the load on the database... and you will also avoid annoying other contributors by having constant edits to the same page appear on the . Using show preview allows you to check the changes you made without saving, thus allowing you to alter them/preview them repeatedly until you get it the way you like. Please remember this in the future." --From Andoria with Love 00:03, 14 September 2007 (UTC) :I followed this conversation over here from Shran's talk page and have a couple suggestions for your power outage issues. If you use an external editor that will allow you to save your changes locally and then upload to the server once, you will have the best of both worlds. Otherwise, you could use a simple text editor like Notepad and copy the entire text of an article and edit, then paste over top of the old article text when you're done. You can save locally that way, too. Possibility number three would be to invest in an UPS device that will power your computer for a minute or two as the power goes out, then you can quickly save your edit to notepad before it shuts down. --Topher 20:29, 24 September 2007 (UTC) ::As long as you're using the save preview as often as possible, that's all we ask. If you have a legitimate reason for making so many edits, that's fine. That said, though, I would try one of the suggestions Topher offered above. Instead of editing in sections, I would edit the entire article at once (by clicking the "edit this page" tab at the top of the page) and copy, paste and save my progress to Microsoft Word or Notebook. If the power goes out, you'll have your changes saved in a Word document or Notebook file and can just copy and paste it back into the editing box on MA. (You have probably tried this or thought about this already, but just to be sure...) Also, I would suggest using Mozilla Firefox when editing MA. With Firefox, when the power goes out and after you reboot and restart Firefox, it will ask you if you want to restore your session. Click yes, and it should reload the editing page, complete with all the changes you made prior to the power outage. This isn't guaranteed, of course, but it's done it without fail for me in the few times I lost power or I accidentally closed my browser or something. Anyway, those are just some suggestions and if they don't help, then I wouldn't worry about it. But do look into those. ;) --From Andoria with Love 21:46, 24 September 2007 (UTC) Images Whatever was wrong with the images should be fixed now. Try re-uploading your Tessa image. --From Andoria with Love 21:04, 29 September 2007 (UTC) :Sorry, meant to add this to Eyes Only's talk page. Oh, well, he found out, regardless. ;) Now, if you'll excuse me, I gotta go drop some more trees... :P --From Andoria with Love 21:22, 29 September 2007 (UTC) Are we reaching? ;) Hey, CzechOut. Just making sure you read the responses from Sulfur and myself regarding your show preview question. Let me or Sulfur know if you have any more problems. --From Andoria with Love 03:28, 8 October 2007 (UTC) Nazdar... Koukám, že někdo tu mluví česky odkud jsi?? sleduji jak zde přispíváš.. :-) já pracuji na vlastních projektech.. se mužeš kouknout na mém profilu tady... petr Speedy Deletes :Moved from now-deleted PfD... Not sure what the hell I did, but somehow in trying to leave a message about the template itself, I created a subpage of the template talk page. Basically just administrative request; speedy deletion recommended. CzechOut ☎ | 22:05, 30 October 2007 (UTC) :Please note that it's best to use the Immediate Delete page for those, rather than creating these PfDs. -- Sulfur 23:21, 30 October 2007 (UTC) Of Gods and Men Hey, CzechOut. I did some investigating on that broken link for Star Trek: Of Gods and Men. Apparently, the site is temporarily down due to an abundance of traffic caused by their announcement of the impending release date. Kind of scary, huh? If the site goes down just because they announced something, imagine what will happen when they actually try to release the darn thing. - Bridge 20:12, 3 November 2007 (UTC) Hello, again. The above is based on what I read at TrekUnited.com forums from one of their administrators or webmasters. Actually it's a little more detailed than I realized. Seems in conjunction with announcing the release date, they sent out a newsletter to a bunch of people who had registered for it and that caused the site breakdown. - Bridge 20:37, 3 November 2007 (UTC) Temporal Cold War Story Arc Thanks for helping get a few episodes in there. Although when I made the arc I did it with the intention of the main episods in the arc; such as those that directly involved Daniels or Silik (so as to avoid putting all of ENT Season 3 in there). -Lord Hyren 19:12, 14 November 2007 (UTC) a tip to improve your editing hi. i saw on your user-page that you like to get help on how to improve your editing. i took a look on your sandbox-page. there i noticed one thing. you could, instead of doing a normal link to an episode, use the episode-template.' . ' then it looks a little better, from my POV. When you hoover your marker on the link, you can see in what season+number the episode is/has. other templates it's good to use is the uss-template. The Enterprise-D will with that template look like this: .and last Shipclass-template. . I like templates, they are many times much faster to use than normal linking. --myÖrlogstalkkaptenpage 09:33, 19 November 2007 (UTC) Confirmation(?) Hi, CzechOut. Could you please confirm, on this page, whether or not you find your objections to the prospect of the Gorkon article receiving FA status have been sufficiently resolved? --Defiant 20:55, October 19, 2011 (UTC) Categories Next time, before creating categories, you can bring it up for discussion, like it says to do in the policy. Since I wouldn't have supported a category for Medical databases, that has been deleted. - 18:54, June 3, 2012 (UTC) :I honestly had no idea that simple category creation required committee approval. Thanks for pointing out the policy. I'll adhere to this in future. Unfortunately, that means I probably won't be spending any more time trying to improve the category tree. I simply have too many responsibilities elsewhere to monitor an approval page here for 7 days to see if the motion passed. :Still, if I can, I'd like to offer a few observations, as someone who has spent a lot of his time on Wikia organising category trees: :*I think the whole policy is built on shaky ground. It's hardly a "labor-intensive process to remove or alter a category name once it exists", as the policy suggests. I've made tens of thousands of category moves at w:c:tardis, and there's nothing remotely difficult about it. In fact, it's probably the easiest part of pywikipedia usage. Sure, ordinary users might have a tedious time of it, but pywikipediabot scripts make a lie out of this entire policy. Since I learned how to use pywikipediabot from sulfur, I naturally assumed that you guys wouldn't really have a policy entirely based on just what an ordinary user can do with categories. And I mean, you've got experience with pywikipediabots too, don't you? Surely you don't believe that the policy is telling the truth. I'm not saying the policy should necessarily be abolished, but the rationale should at least be plausible, don't ya think? Heck, the policy says that "categories must be orphaned to be deleted", which is simply not true of the MediaWiki software at all. You can delete categories with any number of members. And with Wikia's changes to categories, you stand a decent chance of a person creating a page with a non-existent category, anyway. A bluelinked category hardly means what it used to when the policy was written. :*I'd also point out that this rather complicated process of category approval may be one of the reasons that your category tree isn't particularly well developed. Now maybe you like how things are, but a lot of your categories are so huge that browsing is a forbidding prospect. I mean, category:Computer technology is entirely amorphous. It could be much more helpfully subcategorized. I have a devil of a time finding things around here just because everything is in such whopping great categories like category:medicine, category:biology and whatnot. I have to page through almost all of these categories just to get to the letter T''. :* Finally, your category tree ultimately has no single root. Category:Memory Alpha maintenance for instance is a completely separate tree from category:Lists, so you've got ''multiple category trees instead of one. That makes it harder to understand the overall structure of the database. You've placed the key to the category tree at Memory Alpha:Category tree instead of making it self-evident in the actual category tree itself. I have to be honest and tell you that, despite being registered here since 2007, I had no idea what the category tree of this wiki tree was until you directed me to Memory Alpha:Category tree — cause you just can't find it by simple browsing. 20:15: Sun 03 Jun 2012 ::I'll only say that there are reasons that we have the category processes we do. It's important for the need and scope of a category to be worked out before it is created. What makes perfect sense to you for a category or organization might not make any sense at all to others. If you have suggestions for new categories that you feel would make things better organized, feel free to suggest them. Much like yourself, people work on them or suggest categories when they can; that's probably why some of them may still need reorganization. 31dot 20:21, June 3, 2012 (UTC) :Okay, so there are "reasons" but those reasons certainly can't be those which are actually listed at the policy page. All I'm suggesting is that the reasons given at the policy site should be truthful. There's zero truth there now, and anyone who's touched a bot knows that. :Also, sure, your idea of a category tree might not jibe with mine. But if one has to submit each individual category for committee decision, one can never make genuine forward progress on a tree. Or at the very least that progress will be so incredibly slow as to deter any user. I mean what happens if I get approval for the grandchild category but not the grandparent? Building a category tree is a process of one category leading to another. If you're requiring that each categorical level be approved, it's entirely possible that a tree will never be created because the categories at the top of a section of branches fails, even though its children succeed. :For instance, let's say that I wanted to create: ::Databases :::Medical databases ::::Starfleet medical databases ::::Klingon medical databases ::::Talaxian medical databases :And imagine that Medical databases passed the review process but Talaxian medical databases didn't and Databases itself didn't. I'm not that bothered by Talaxian failing because that doesn't upset the overall structure. It's a bottom-level category, and maybe there just aren't enough articles to justify it. Fine. But the failure of Databases is far more troubling. I would obviously have started my debate on Medical databases under the assumption that Databases would be approved. So now where do I anchor Medical databases, and its two children? :Now, maybe you would say that's not how the system goes around here. Maybe the deal is that you first get Databases approved, then you go on to Medical databases, and only then do you move on to the more specific ones. But what would that take? 21 damn days unless support from the community made it go faster. A simple, two level branch could take as much as 21 days around here! Surely you can see that's an inefficient way to build a category tree. :I just don't see how you can actually build a structure if you have to get approval for each and every girder that you're adding to the assembly. This policy, it seems to me, is one which does not assume good faith. It says to your user base, "You're probably gonna screw it up, so we'll create such an elaborate approval process that you won't even bother with categories anymore." Or, worse, it's saying, think about categories as an isolated island of information. Get approval to build that island and then move on to the next. This one-at-a-time approach is entirely antithetical to the notion of a tree. :I urge you to let people try to build trees, not islands. Sure, the average user might make mistakes along the way with the name of the odd category. But these can certainly be addressed ex post facto and easily changed with a bot once consensus on a better name has been reached. The name of any category is as cosmetic and pliable as the name of an article. To suggest that the average user would do some sort of serious harm to the database by having the free ability to create categories is insupportable. In the first place, most users don't give a damn about categories. And in the second, those that do will probably make an appropriate category, even if they get the name slightly wrong. The user bold enough to attempt categories has no interest in creating a useless category, because they still have to take the time to apply the category manually, page-by-page. For instance, the community might not like the nomenclature category:USS Whatever personnel — maybe you want to put the registry in there — but you'd be hard-pressed to admit that it's not useful to have a category of some name about the USS Whatever's crew. Once the user has done the hard work of adding the category to various pages, it's then a snap for the admin to quickly rename the category properly. :I ask you to consider which is better: :*getting someone who's enthusiastic about starting and adding a new category to do the grunt work of adding that category and connecting it to the tree, and then cleaning up any mistakes with a 2-minute bot run :or :*stopping them cold in their tracks, making 'em submit a formal request, and then making them wait seven days until 100% of their enthusiasm is spent, leaving you with an approved category name that then doesn't get applied :As an admin elsewhere, I would take the mis-named — but populated! — category any day of the damn week. 21:19: Sun 03 Jun 2012 ::I moved your post here, to keep the conversation in one place, as I prefer to do with my usertalk page. I will say that if you wish to have it out on this issue, that you do so at Memory Alpha talk:Category suggestions instead of just on various users' pages. The only other comment I have is that I cannot agree with your last statement- it's not just about the name, but about things like scope, formatting, etc. 31dot 21:24, June 3, 2012 (UTC) ::Frankly, I think the scattered "damn"s are unnecessary, and do not build goodwill towards your point of view. 31dot 21:25, June 3, 2012 (UTC) ::You also do not have to propose each individual category, if you wish to add a few to reorganize a larger one- we have approved blanket category additions in the past. I apologize for the multiple posting; but I see things as I reread your post. 31dot 21:30, June 3, 2012 (UTC) :Um, what? I gave a thoughtful and detailed assessment of current policy and you criticize me for using the word damn three times for appropriate contextual emphasis? Last time I checked, damn was only archaically a swear word and definitely a word with multiple appearances in the subject matter of this wiki. I didn't step one centimetre outta line, but if it offends you, I'll certainly apologise and try to restrain my use of it. :I should also point out that I didn't choose where to ask these questions. You came to my page. I'm just answering your hail, as it were. So I'd appreciate it if you actually answered me, rather than absurdly suggesting that your user talk page isn't the place to respond to, well, you. I'd prefer a bit more of a focus on the merits of what I'm saying rather than being told where I can ask my questions or what words I can use while making my inquiry. :You've said, "It's not just about the name, but about things like scope, formatting, etc." I've been around wikis for a long time, so I find that just a tad baffling. A category is just a step on a ladder, a branch on a tree. From a backend point of view, one category has no different scope than another. They all perform exactly the same function, a function defined uniformly by the MediaWiki software. There are only two types of category: hidden and visible. That's it. There aren't big and small categories. There aren't categories for strings and other categories for numbers. All categories are for pages. You can't, therefore, "format" a category. Every category has the same format. And in terms of scope, a category merely forms a bridge between its parent and its child. So it's scope should be narrower than its parent but broader than its child, and the only useful definition that a category has is its name. Any text you might want to put on the category page is all well and good — but it largely goes unread by people who are just trying to add a category to a page with autosuggest. :As I've said, I really don't think I've got the time to shepherd a number of intricate category tree changes through an elaborate approval process. Instead, what I'm trying to figure out is simply the rationale for the policy. Did you guys get burned at some point by "category vandals"? Was there some big schism at some point in the wiki's past over the creation of categories? Was the policy written before most admin had bots? Is this a holdover thing from the pre-Wikia days and a very much earlier version of MediaWiki? There's gotta be some explanation why Memory Alpha:Category tree is flat out fibbing. And the other thing is that it's not even really that enforceable these days since most users don't see redlinked categories anymore. Most users could plausibly create a new category without even knowing it. So if it's possible to innocently create a new category, how can you logically have a rule against it? You can't get mad at someone for doing something Wikia don't want them to even see that they're doing. :At the end of the day, what I'm saying is, look at the policy. Don't just accept it as is. Consider whether it's still relevant in the current Wikia climate. Allow yourself to wonder whether it's compatible with the basic precepts of "assuming good faith" and being bold. 23:29: Sun 03 Jun 2012 ::Since you seem to be all about policies, you should read the one about keeping your indentation consistent. Saying damn does not bother me in and of itself; I'm a big boy, and I don't seek an apology- I was only stating I feel that it doesn't help your case. ::I cannot speak to the entire history of this site, as I have only been here since 2007. I only know that the procedure for discussing categories has been here relatively unchanged that entire time, with few complaints. I frankly don't see what the problem is here, despite your lengthy explanations; I don't think it is "an elaborate approval process" to post what you want to do and get someone to agree with you. We are not the US Congress; things can get done if people want them to. ::I originally posted here merely to clarify a point, not to debate policies with you- doing which should be done on the talk page of the relevant policy and not a specific user's page, since policies concern all here. If you dislike the category suggestion page, then bring it up on that page; it is your right to do so. You may have some interesting points, I don't know, but they should be debated and discussed in the correct place. 31dot 01:36, June 4, 2012 (UTC) I've also inserted CzechOut's reply to the original post here where I think it happened chronology, and I'll reply to parts of it here as well, saving the policy parts for that talk page. I have not read the rest below that. For the record, I have no experience with a working bot, though I do have a username "reserved" for one, and all my edits to categories are done by hand. Since I'm the guy who has subdivided some of our largest categories, and added other ones containing hundreds of pages, I'm down right offended that you think it's so easy that it isn't worth mentioning. Until all users have bots by default, our policies and guidelines will reflect that fact and highlight the amount of time and effort it takes to change one of these. Also, since it doesn't seem clear, MA is not a wiki that was created at wikia, and our host does not make or change the policy on this site every time they make an asinine decision that breaks a basic function of the software. You may buy their reasoning, but the and I do not. - 05:00, June 4, 2012 (UTC) Well, the category script is, in fact, so easy you don't need to know anything about bot programming or regex to use it. Literally, the bot says, "What's the old category? What's the new one?" And that's it. There's no need to be offended by that. It's just a statement of fact that it's simple. I don't know why you'd want to deny yourself such a useful tool. I'm sure you could find someone here who'd help you set one up. Certainly I'd be glad to help you, if asked. Because of the existence of pywikipedia scripts, it's just a straight up lie that it takes any significant time or effort to change a category name. I don't deny that if you choose to edit manually it will take a long time — but that's totally your choice. If instead you spend the time learning what a pywikipediabot can do to improve your editing efficiency, you'd soon come to realise how much time you literally wasted doing it manually. Seriously, the very first time you ran the category script, you'd instantly wonder why you ever did it any other way. And your suggestion that every user should have a bot only underlines your current knowledge gap about bots. In no way would you ever want to give ordinary users access to such a powerful tool. This in fact is why Wikia don't give even bureaucrats the power to declare a user a bot, and why they don't even let non-admin ask for the bot flag. I'd urge you not to be so proud of the time you've spent doing things the hard way. I'm not trying to denigrate your past work; believe me I've done plenty of tedious, manual work myself. But if there's no need to, why would you want to? Finally, I know you have a belief that somehow the pre-Wikia life of this community confers upon it some sort of special status that gives you the right to be openly contemptuous of Wikia. As you've probably surmised, I've got my doubts about that. But in this instance I pushed as hard as I possibly could against the bluelink category thing. It's one of the few changes that I think it's totally stupid. But it's the way that it is. There's little use in saying that it doesn't have an at least potential impact on you. Your WantedCategories list may be clean now, but will it remain so when you finally get some new Star Trek content next year that drives a flock of inexperienced editors to your site? And if Wikia pull the WantedCategories report, which could well happen, it'll be even harder to catch what in the past we've called "uncreated categories". 05:47: Mon 04 Jun 2012 Actually, MA is treated differently from the rest of wikia right now, and it is copyrighted differently from the rest of wikia, excepting Unencyclopedia; so yes, I do have grounds to treat a company that: #Acts like it owns the material here that "by law" can't be use for profit, or elsewhere that can't be "owned" in a traditional sense #Treats it's "active content maintainers" like slaves, and it's users like idiots #Clearly has no intent to... ##Keep it's word on anything that can't change at their whim ##Providing a working and stable system ##Teach people how to use the software as designed ##Listen to feedback or acknowledging that it might have ##Provide any real transparency on how they make their money off of your work ##Treat you like the people who are doing the work that gets them their money ##Stay a content creator instead of a content content aggregator #Spends more time getting people like you to think it's OK for them to do those things then beta or bug testing their "features" ...like the liars, thieves, and downright nefarious collection of people it really is, and that's the way it is. Oh, and I'm not "proud" I haven't got around to getting a bot yet, but I'm not going to treat those without one like second class users when proposing polices. That kind of biased thinking is a slippery slope, and you might want to check your footing. - 06:25, June 4, 2012 (UTC) :In absolutely no way am I suggesting that people without a bot are "second class users". The current category policy does a nice job of that already. The direct implication of current policy is that the admin here do not trust the average user to create the category tree. That is abundantly clear in the 2004/5 coversations at Memory Alpha talk:Category tree. Bot-enabled admin would absolutely democratize the category process. :Moreover, your emphasis on the "effort" and "hard work" it takes to change category creates a second class citizenry. Only in your example, the limiting factor isn't possession of a bot, but rather the possession of time and patience — neither of which are genuinely necessary to the changing of categories. :In my view, it's not that admin and users are groups separated by power, but groups separated by focus. Admin have a different set of rights because they are the wiki's janitors. They must clean up the joint, because they've been equipped to do so. Having a bot is simply an extension of those rights — a tool that admin can use to accomplish the onerous housekeeping chores that are, by definition, theirs to complete. :I honestly don't know why you're being so truculent about this; it's clear you took actions last month that necessitated sulfur to fire up his bot for simple template replacement. If you had a bot, you'd be able to be bold, as you clearly wished to be in that instance, and yet not obligate anyone else to clean up after you. :Besides, it's a total red herring to suggest that this category issue is about whether people can have bots on this wiki, or whether having a bot makes certain users "second class" for not having one. The community has already ruled that bots are allowed here. Since there are users running bots, it hardly matters that you personally don't seem to want to. What matters is that policy be written to accommodate the realities of what bots can do. 14:37: Mon 04 Jun 2012 :::And the reality is that the category scheme we have... works. And works well. Sure, it's not the same one you use at the Doctor Who wiki, but it works well for MA. -- sulfur 14:44, June 4, 2012 (UTC) Wikipedia links Just a tip; Wikipedia links should not be within the in-universe portion of articles, as Wikipedia is not a part of the Star Trek universe. I removed the links, but left the words at band music. 31dot 18:29, June 9, 2012 (UTC) Speedy deletions To clarify for you, articles should be tagged for speedy deletion only under these circumstances. Just FYI. 31dot 21:54, June 10, 2012 (UTC) Deep Space 9 v Deep Space Nine Please note that the station is "Deep Space 9" and the show is "Deep Space Nine". Please take this into account when adding it as a link on articles. Thanks. -- sulfur (talk) 19:18, September 10, 2012 (UTC)